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the Blue Mountains, with axes in their blistered hands, hewing a wagon-way through the crossed and crisscrossed fallen trees.
Nesmith says, "Sticcas was a faithful old fellow, and although not speaking a word of English, and no one in our party a word of Cayuse, he succeeded, by pantomime, in taking us over the roughest wagon-route I ever saw."
A heavy snow fell in the mountains, the warning of approaching winter. Descending the western slope, there lay before them the great valley of the Columbia. At their feet the Cayuse lodge-fires curled on the green Umatilla. Miles away the sinewy Hood, and his sister St. Helen's, swam in light, Mt. Adams lay like a couchant lion, and winding 'mid her battlements, the Columbia, a long line of liquid gold, blazed in the setting sun. Fatigue was forgotten in this glorified glimpse of the promised land. Exultant, the train of wagons rolled into the plain.
High on a spur of the Blue Mountains one stood and watched the moving caravan. A dark scowl of hate disfigured his face, his clenched hand, lifted, sunk again. Too well the Delaware knew the story of American immigration.
For miles the Indians came to view that caravan, that, farther than Caesar bore the Roman eagles, had come to claim a land. But the feature that most engaged the Indians was the wagons, the mysterious " horse canoes," that rolled along over the obstinate bunch-grass, bearing women and little children into Oregon. On, on they came, it seemed to the Indians a never-ending train, as if that great mysterious land to the east was pouring itself into the vales of the Columbia. All their doubts, all their fears, all their terro
